The Moore Tornado May Have Done $2 Billion Worth of Property Damage

The mayor of Moore provided one of the first estimates of the total cost stemming from Monday's tornado: between $1.5 and $2 billion — a sum that's about a quarter the size of Oklahoma's state budget. If that total pans out, it would make the Moore tornado the third-most costly in American history.

This morning, the Oklahoma Insurance Department said the preliminary tornado damage estimate could top $2 billion. This would make the 2013 Moore tornado the 2nd most expensive tornado in history (as ranked by NOAA/SPC) or 3rd most expensive (as ranked by insurance broker Aon Benfield.)

[T]he lawmaker said that in the case of Hurricane Sandy, "everybody was getting in and exploiting the tragedy that took place." However, he said, "that won't happen in Oklahoma." …

Inhofe said the Sandy Relief bill "was supposed to be in New Jersey," but "they were getting things … in the Virgin Islands, fixing roads there, and putting roofs on houses in Washington, D.C." Both Inhofe and Coburn voted to slash aid to victims of Hurricane Sandy, with Inhofe saying he considered the full proposed aid amount to be a "slush fund."

Or that the financial need is comparable. Using a February estimate for Sandy's total cost, we added it to the graph, as below.

This massive cost differential is largely a function of population density. A storm that hits New York City will almost always be more costly than one that hits a primarily rural area — there are more buildings and more people and more infrastructure.

Each disaster has an enormous emotional cost and, God forbid, a human one. That cost is incomparable. It can't be captured in a graph.